The grass-fed dairy cow that wasn’t supposed to work

The cow that started it all

Over 20 years ago I was on a mission to find something that would change the entire trajectory of my life (although I had no idea at the time). It was the early 2000’s, and the internet was young, but I had a fresh copy of Jo Robinson’s Pasture Perfect: The Far-Reaching Benefits of Choosing Meat, Eggs, and Dairy Products from Grass-Fed Animals and I was on a mission to find a grass fed dairy cow. 

At that time online forums were popping up everywhere and I was lucky enough to be an early member of Joann Grohman’s Keeping a Family Cow online community. I had searched high and low for a grass fed dairy cow with no luck when I received my monthly subscription to The Stockman Grass Farmer and in the classifieds was an ad for a farm that was selling its herd of grassfed Jersey and Jersey x Normande cross cows. Peaceful Pastures was an early grass-based raw milk farm in Tennessee, and circumstances had forced them to sell their dairy herd. I finagled a truck and trailer and headed off to Tennessee to buy a cow. When I got there the owner walked me through his entire herd and was so heartbroken about selling “his ladies”. After a couple hours of tracking up and down a Tennessee mountain looking them all over I just couldn’t decide which to pick. After some negotiations the decision was made and eight, yes eight, grassfed dairy cows were loaded onto the trailer. I figured that since it was so hard to find these cows I could bring them back to Missouri and sell them to cover the cost of my trip.When I got back to Missouri, all hell broke loose. I had a rented pasture with plenty of grass and water but I didn’t have a single other thing. Not a barn, not a stanchion, not a lick of hay, no experience with cows OR milking and zero plan. Four of the cows were in milk and I had literally never touched a cow in my life (plenty of horses but no cows).I was very lucky that Sherman, the man that owned the land, knew how to hand milk a cow. What followed was a whirlwind couple of days: a crash course in hand milking, a tiny shed thrown together with a makeshift stanchion, and an emergency trip to Hamby Dairy just north of us for a milking machine when it became painfully clear that I couldn’t hang with milking four cows by hand twice a day. Eventually, I fell into an exhausted rhythm of getting the girls milked and fed morning and night. Talk about trial by fire. I found out later that some of the local farming community had apparently been taking bets on how long I would last and how long it would take me to kill the cows. Meanwhile, I still hadn’t found the time to list the extra cows for sale, and I was absolutely drowning in milk. I put a quick listing on Realmilk.com, thinking I could sell some of the excess until I got my feet under me and figured out what to do with the rest of the herd. Instead, my phone started ringing off the hook. There simply wasn’t anyone else around Kansas City offering milk from truly grass fed dairy cows, and almost as quickly as I could produce it, someone wanted it.Before the cows came along, I had also planted a big garden to feed my family. Once I put a refrigerator in the garage to handle the regular milk pickups, I started setting out whatever vegetables I had left from the garden that I didn’t have time to preserve because, well, I was now milking cows twice a day. Those disappeared too. The people coming for milk became regular families, and what had started as a temporary situation to my eight cow problem quickly became organized into a membership. Somewhere in all of that chaos, the cows I intended to sell never got sold, the garden stopped just being our garden, and without ever setting out to farm for a living, I had apparently started a farm.

Apparently, this isn’t supposed to work

If you want to whip a group of hornets into a frenzy, hop into any small farming chat group and bring up grass fed dairy cows. There is a large and very vocal group of cow owners who believe a dairy cow cannot safely thrive without grain. But it wasn’t always that way.

In those early years of the Family Cow forum, there was a small percentage of us who had milk cows that could safely maintain themselves on grazing and hay without grain. We bonded over a shared goal and swapped stories about management, what to do when a cow just wasn’t working in that system (it happens), and cheered each other along as each generation of heifers was better than the one before. There wasn’t harsh criticism from the cow owners who managed their herds differently. We were all just trying to be successful shepherds.

As the years went on, I spent less and less time in the forum as farming took up more and more of my life. By the time Facebook took off, some of the Family Cow community had moved there, but the tone was different. I would occasionally jump in when a new cow owner was looking for help with a grain-free cow, only to be bombarded by dozens of people willing to talk much louder than I was. Eventually it became nearly impossible to be heard.

In their defense, even though I disagreed with how some of them handled themselves, they were seeing real problems. The popularity of keeping a family milk cow had skyrocketed, but the supply of cows actually suited to that job hadn’t magically skyrocketed along with it. Cull cows from commercial dairies were being sold and resold, often without their original health, breeding or production information. Some people bought groups of commercial dairy cows and resold them as grass fed dairy cows to brand new cow owners who had no reason to know the difference.

As you can imagine, a lot of cows ended up in inexperienced hands and an onslaught of emergencies followed. New cow owners, often without the support or even availability of a large animal vet (hello national shortage of those), turned to forums and Facebook groups for help. They were dealing with mastitis, milk fever, ketosis, calving problems, emaciated cows and a whole slew of other issues, while trying to sort through a very mixed bag of good and bad advice online.

Over time, the grass fed dairy cow was positioned to take the fall for an industry that had boomed in popularity and become overrun with mislabeled cows, misguided shepherding and scrambled advice. It isn’t hard to understand how people watching thousands of these emergencies unfold could come to believe that taking grain away from a dairy cow was dangerous.

Those people were absolutely seeing something real. They were just drawing the wrong conclusion from it.

It starts with the cow

Dairy cows fall into all kinds of categories, but for the sake of this story I’m going to divide them into two: those that can truly thrive without grain and those that can’t.

And when I say thrive, I don’t simply mean stay alive and give some milk. I mean a cow that can maintain appropriate body condition, produce a reasonable amount of milk, remain metabolically healthy, breed back reliably, carry and deliver a calf, and then do it all over again year after year on excellent pasture and stored forage without being propped up by supplements.

To understand why some cows can do that and others struggle, you have to understand what we have spent generations asking dairy cows to do.

Historically, cattle were much more likely to be dual purpose animals. A family needed a cow that could raise a calf, provide extra milk for the house, maintain herself on what the farm could grow and still produce offspring with enough muscle to be useful for meat. Over time, dairy cattle were increasingly bred for one specific job: produce more milk.

That shift accelerated dramatically in the middle of the twentieth century as dairy breeding became increasingly focused on milk production. Cows became leaner and capable of putting an extraordinary amount of energy into the milk bucket. The prominent ribs and hips we now associate with the classic dairy-cow shape became normal, and supporting that much milk production required a much more energy-dense diet than pasture and hay could reliably provide.

But not every herd went entirely in that direction. Some farmers continued keeping genetics from cows with a stouter frame that could maintain good body condition on pasture and quality hay, stay healthy, breed back every year and still put plenty of milk in the bucket.

The tradeoff was production.

A modern commercial dairy cow can produce an astonishing amount of milk. A cow from the older, grass-based genetics might produce roughly half as much. On paper, that makes her the lower-producing cow.

But that depends entirely on what you’re asking the cow to do.

For our farm, gallons have never been the only measure of a good dairy cow. I need a cow that can take the grass we grow during the grazing season and the forage we put up for winter and turn it into plenty of milk while still taking care of herself. She needs to hold good body condition, stay healthy, breed back, carry a calf and do it all over again the next year. Three or four gallons of milk a day from a cow that can do all of those things is far more valuable in our system than seven or eight gallons from a cow whose nutritional needs we can’t meet without bringing concentrated feed into the equation.

And that is where genetics matter so much.

The eight cows I hauled home from Tennessee gave me a tremendous head start because I wasn’t starting with commercial dairy genetics and trying to make them fit a grass-based system. I was starting with cows that had already been selected to work in one. But those original cows were only the beginning. For more than twenty years, each generation has given me another opportunity to keep the traits that work here and move away from the ones that don’t.

By the time one of our heifers is growing up, I can usually tell pretty clearly what kind of cow she is going to become. We select for a shorter, wider, more rugged frame rather than the tall, lean dairy frame most people picture when they think of a milk cow. I look for a wide muzzle, balanced face, deep brisket, balanced feet and legs, and a slick coat once she sheds out. After breeding this way for so many generations, we honestly don’t see many of those leaner, dairy-framed heifers anymore.

But there is another part of raising these cows that has nothing to do with what I can see by looking at them.

Our heifers stay with their mothers for four to six months, growing up within the herd and learning how to graze from the cows around them. They learn what to eat, where to find it and how to move through a pasture selecting the forage they need. A motivated grazer is incredibly valuable in a grass-based dairy herd. We used to have picky cows that simply weren’t as good at making use of what was available to them. After more than twenty years of selecting and raising replacements within this system, we really don’t have those cows anymore.

That distinction matters because a truly grass fed dairy cow isn’t created by simply taking the grain away.

She is the product of generations of genetics selected for the job, raised within a herd that knows how to graze and managed in a system designed to give her what she needs. The cow is the first piece of the equation.

The next piece is what’s growing under her feet.

Grass isn’t just grass

Of course, having the right cow is only half of the equation. If you are going to ask her to produce milk, maintain her body condition, grow a calf and breed back every year without grain, you better give her something pretty exceptional to eat.

When I say our cows are grass fed, it probably conjures up an image of cows standing in a green pasture eating, well, grass. The reality is much more diverse. Our pastures are a mix of big bluestem, little bluestem, Indian grass, switchgrass, Eastern gamagrass, Virginia wild rye, partridge pea, bundleflower and Maximilian sunflower, along with red and white clover we have added over the years.

But apparently no one told the cows that “grass fed” means they are only supposed to eat grass.

They trim the low hanging leaves from our oak and Osage orange trees, nip the tops off wild carrots and thistles, eat the tops of spiky amaranth and happily make use of plants most people would simply call weeds, including ragweed and Johnson grass. Given the opportunity, a cow is remarkably good at moving through a diverse pasture and selecting what she wants and needs.

That diversity doesn’t disappear when the grazing season ends. We stockpile forage in the pastures for them to graze into the colder months and feed round bales of native prairie hay along with non-GMO alfalfa hay through the winter. Other than minerals, salt, kelp and water, that forage is their entire diet.

So when I say our dairy cows are 100% grass fed, I don’t mean we took a dairy cow, put her behind a fence with some grass and stopped feeding grain. The cow herself has been selected for generations to thrive in this system, and the land she lives on has to provide the diversity and quality of forage that allows her to do it.

What ends up in the milk

Ultimately, everything we have been talking about matters because it affects the food those cows produce.

What a dairy cow eats can actually change the nutritional composition of her milk. That means the genetics we have spent decades selecting, the diverse pastures those cows graze all summer and the forage they eat through the winter eventually make their way back to the reason I went looking for that first grass fed dairy cow in the first place: the milk.

One of the most studied differences is in the fat. Research comparing milk from cows on nearly 100% forage-based diets with conventional milk has found higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, better known as CLA, along with a significantly different balance between omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. Other research on pasture-fed cows has found differences in antioxidants and fat-soluble vitamins including beta-carotene and vitamins A and E. In other words, what you feed the cow really can change what ends up in the milk.

Another nutrient worth mentioning is vitamin K2. Dairy foods, particularly full-fat and fermented dairy products like cheese, can contain several forms of K2, also called menaquinones. K2 has become an increasingly talked-about nutrient because of the role vitamin K plays in helping our bodies properly use calcium, including directing it toward bones and teeth. It is another naturally occurring component of the full-fat milk, cream, butter and cheeses our cows produce.

That was one of the things that fascinated me all those years ago when I first read Pasture Perfect. The idea that how an animal is raised could actually change the food it produces sent me looking for that first cow, and more than twenty years later it is still one of the reasons we put so much effort into maintaining this particular herd and the pastures that support it.

There is one other genetic trait we have intentionally selected for over the years. Every cow in our dairy herd is genetically tested for her beta-casein type, and we maintain an A2/A2 herd. A1 and A2 are simply different variants of one of the primary proteins found in cow’s milk. There is research suggesting that milk containing only A2 beta-casein may be easier for some people to digest. I’m not particularly interested in convincing anyone whether A2 matters to them or not. If it does, we’ve already done the work of testing our cows and maintaining those genetics in the herd.

None of these things happened by accident. They are the result of the cow, what she eats, how she was raised and generations of decisions made long before the milk ever makes it into the jar.

Twenty years later

I wish I could remember the names of all eight cows that climbed onto that trailer in Tennessee more than twenty years ago. I remember some of them: Momma, Brockle, Nana and Mable. They were the OG ladies, and I certainly didn’t understand at the time just how much they were bringing home to Missouri with them.

I thought I was buying cows. What I really brought home was the beginning of a herd.

Those cows gave us the genetics we have spent more than twenty years building on. Their daughters had daughters, and with every generation we learned a little more about what worked on our land and in our system. We kept the heifers that held their condition, grazed hard, stayed healthy, bred back and became the kind of cows we wanted more of. Eventually the traits we once had to search for became simply what our herd is.

It’s funny to think about how hard I had to work to find that first grass fed dairy cow. I searched everywhere I knew to look, found an obscure classified ad in The Stockman Grass Farmer, finagled a truck and trailer, drove to Tennessee and somehow came home with eight cows when I only intended to buy one.

Today, the milk from the herd those ladies started goes home every week with families who know exactly where it came from. Along with it goes the cream, butter, yogurt and cheese we make from that same milk. What once required me to search halfway across the country has become a normal part of Friday and Saturday around here.

But there really isn’t anything normal about it. Behind every jar of milk is the cow that produced it, the cows that came before her, the pasture under her feet and more than twenty years of paying attention to what works and what doesn’t.

I went looking for one grass fed dairy cow because I wanted better milk for my own family. I had no idea those cows were going to help me build a farm.